Some applications and application services (“application services” or “app services”), e.g., messaging applications, advertising applications, logging applications, games, can execute on an application platform, such as a social networking platform that provides a social networking application. In such configurations, application service developers develop the application services and configure them for use by users of (“deploy” them in) the social networking platform. The application services can be developed as per specifications required by the social networking platform. Although the social networking platform can provide an environment in which the application services can execute, some features, such as scalability, reliability, etc., may have to be factored in by the application service developers. As an example, the application service developers may have to program their services according to their preferences or requirements regarding these factors. Many social networking platforms do not provide such features, and those that provide them are inefficient, complex, not cost-effective, require significant development effort from the application service developers, etc.
For example, some social networking platforms that have millions of users and manage a significant amount of data associated with the users offer some data partitioning services to manage data efficiently. However, the data partitioning services often become inefficient over time. For example, the partitioning services can statically create data partitions (“shards”), and may not thereafter consider (a) load changes of the servers over time, (b) uneven load distribution on different partitions, and/or (c) uneven capacity of servers handling the partitions. The partitioning services can also be application service specific, e.g., different application services can have different partitioning services. As a result, the statically created data partitions can become “stale” and again cause various performance and network bandwidth inefficiencies.